Descent Into Chaos (56 page)

Habibullah was eventually freed from Guantánamo in September 2003 without any charges being filed. Western officials who visited Kandahar jail told me prisoners were detained in open-air cages where twenty men jostled for space in the freezing cold of winter or the blistering desert heat of the summer. They were strip-searched before every interrogation and their hands and feet were always shackled. Guards on raised platforms pointed guns at them and at night shone searchlights into their faces. There were dozens of American female guards—far too many for a conservative people such as the Afghans to get used to. Female guards began to use the tactics that would become infamous at Abu Ghraib—unbuttoning their blouses and displaying cleavage, taunting the prisoners by shouting obscenities at them or staring at them through the cages. The guards knew well enough how provocative this could be for conservative Muslims.

U.S. interrogators were operating under enormous constraints because of the catastrophic decline in intelligence and foreign language training within the CIA and the U.S. Army since the end of the cold war. Even though it had been combating al Qaeda since 1996, CENTCOM had failed to prepare for the task. U.S. SOF units could speak to their NA allies only in Arabic or Russian, as none was trained to speak Afghan or Pakistani languages. Interrogators were even worse off, depending entirely on interpreters. At the start of the war the U.S. Army had only 510 fully trained interrogators, including 108 who spoke Arabic—which is spoken by very few Afghans. Instead, the Americans had to depend on hastily trained Afghan translators—a surefire way to lose content, emphasis, and nuance in the interrogation process. After 9/11, U.S. recruiting agencies were used to hire Persian and Pushtu speakers in the United States. They recruited hundreds of Afghan Americans, including New York taxi drivers who had not lived in Afghanistan for years. Others, recruited from the Shia Hazara community in Quetta, Pakistan, had little connection with Afghanistan but spoke Persian. The exiled Taliban were to target these Hazaras, killing them in suicide bombings and worsening the Sunni-Shia conflict in Pakistan.

The few U.S. interrogators in Kandahar had completed only a sixteen-week military-intelligence training course at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona. Their knowledge of the region was close to zero. When Uighur prisoners—Muslims from western China—were delivered, there was no information in the CENTCOM database about who they were. The interrogators had to depend on the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
to learn more about them.
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Adding to the pressure of interrogators in Kandahar were Washington’s demands for “immediate actionable intelligence” about any new attacks al Qaeda might be planning. Abuses, threats, and torture became the quickest way to try to glean intelligence from the prisoners—though most interrogators know that winning over the prisoner is far more profitable than beating him. Soon Kandahar’s haphazard system of interrogation and prisoner abuse was to be transferred to other U.S. detention centers around the world.

The CIA fared no better in gaining reliable intelligence. Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, wrote that in the 1990s hardly anyone in the CIA spoke Pushtu or Persian. Case officers with knowledge of Afghanistan were too few.
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CIA director Porter Goss was to admit in 2004 that it would take five years to rebuild CIA’s HUMINT (for HUMan INTelligence) capability. “I can’t emphasize enough that if you don’t have case officers who can deal with the cultures and the language, you are not going to get much,” he told a Senate hearing.
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The CIA did not even have photographs of Taliban leaders. Afghan con men earned thousands of dollars from the CIA by selling them alleged photographs of Mullah Omar, although most were false. As a superpower engaged in a global war against Islamic extremism, having just invaded one Muslim country and preparing to invade an Arab country, the United States was in a pitiful state of readiness.

The Kandahar interrogation center was closed down in the summer of 2002 and prisoners were transferred to Bagram, where living conditions were equally abysmal. Bagram became the principal long-term detention area in Afghanistan, even though Kandahar jail was reopened in 2003 after the Taliban resurgence began. Known as the Bagram Collection Point, or BCP, the jail was in the middle of the large U.S. Army camp and air force base. Prisoners were housed in a dilapidated former Soviet machine workshop with corrugated iron roofs and cement floors that froze in winter and burned in summer. The building was refitted with five large wire pens for holding prisoners and several isolation cells constructed of plywood. Up to 250 Afghans were incarcerated there at a time. The ICRC complained consistently about the appalling conditions, but improvements were made only after the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq broke. Frequent reports by Carlotta Gall of
The New York Times
exposing cases of abuse and death of Afghan prisoners were ignored by U.S. commanders.
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Since 2002 at least eight Afghan prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, and for years the military did its utmost to restrict information about their cases. The first was Mohammed Sayari, who died while in the custody of U.S. SOF in August 2002, followed in November 2002 by the death of an unnamed detainee at a secret CIA interrogation center in Kabul called the Salt Pit. Dilawar, a taxi driver, and Mullah Noor Habibullah died at Bagram in December 2002. In January 2003, Wakil Mohammed, a woodcutter, was killed by the U.S. SOF near Gardez. Jamal Naseer, a recruit for the Afghan army, died at the hands of the same U.S. SOF unit in March 2003. Abdul Wali, who died at the Asadabad base in June 2003, and Sher Mohammed Khan, who died at a base near Khost, were also in the hands of U.S. SOF.
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The military files regarding the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah at Bagram were leaked to the press only after it became known that the military unit responsible for their deaths had also carried out abuses at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
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In the summer of 2002, Capt. Carolyn Wood, heading Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was assigned to Bagram. The unit sorely lacked experience, and only two of Wood’s men had ever questioned prisoners before. Wood and her unit were to be redeployed to Iraq in March 2003 and later took charge at Abu Ghraib. Once the scandal there broke, it was clear that there had been considerable cross-fertilization in the pattern of abuses carried out by units who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
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After a ponderously slow two-year-long military investigation, twenty-seven soldiers were implicated in the deaths of the two Afghans in Bagram. Fourteen soldiers were prosecuted nearly a year after the horrendous photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were released.
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The inquiry revealed that although the soldiers had little interrogation experience, they had received two days of training in peroneal strikes—disabling blows to the side of the leg just above the knee.
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Mullah Noor Habibullah, a strong defiant man and the brother of a Taliban commander, and Dilawar, twenty-two, a meek man with no connection to terrorism, died within a week of each other in December 2002 after being viciously tortured. Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling for four days and received at least one hundred peroneal strikes. The guards hit him repeatedly to hear him shout, “Allah,” which they seemed to find funny. Just before his death he could neither sit nor stand. His autopsy showed that his leg muscles were “crumbling and falling apart.”
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After he died he was declared innocent. Habibullah, who refused to be cowed and who spat at his interrogators, received even more strikes to the legs.

In court in the United States the defense for the soldiers lay in the ambiguous guidelines for torture the army was now operating under. The trials exposed the fact that with the GC no longer applicable, nobody knew where to draw the line. “The president of the United States doesn’t know what the rules are,” said Capt. Joseph Owens, a lawyer for one of the accused. “The secretary of defense doesn’t know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. to know what the rules are!” he added.
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One soldier, Specialist Willie Brand, admitted to kneeing Dilawar more than thirty times because “I was fed up with him.” Brand was convicted of maiming and assault and could have received sixteen years in prison. Instead, his only punishment was a reduction in rank to private. One U.S. soldier was sentenced to two months in jail, another to three months, a third was demoted, and a fourth had his pay reduced. The stiffest punishment any of the culprits received was five months in jail. There was enormous anger in Kabul at the leniency of the sentences and the failure of the U.S. justice system to punish those responsible. Ahmad Nader Nadery, of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said, “These punishments are a joke with the Afghan people.”
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While all U.S. attention was focused on the abuse of prisoners in Iraqi jails such as Abu Ghraib, severe abuses continued in Afghanistan. Several Afghan prisoners died at U.S. SOF firebases, which the ICRC, the UN, and the Afghan government were barred from visiting. Conditions at these firebases were appalling and abuse was widespread. According to an investigation by the Crimes of War Project and the
Los Angeles Times,
an Afghan prisoner, Jamal Nasser, age eighteen and a recruit for the ANA, died under torture at a SOF firebase in Gardez in March 2003. Another, Wakil Mohammed, an unarmed father of two, was shot dead after he had surrendered. The cases were first reported as battlefield deaths, and an investigation by the U.S. Army was opened only two years later. The culprits belonged to the Alabama-based Twentieth Special Forces Group. Retired Afghan police colonel Syed Nabi Siddiqi, thirty-five, who was held by the same unit in 2003, was subjected to beating, kicking, sleep deprivation, taunts, and sexual abuse.
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In early 2003 ICRC officials complained to staff officers of Gen. Dan McNeill about this unit and five other firebases, including Camp Salerno and Camp Chapman, near Khost, where abuses were being reported.
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By 2005 the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission had logged eight hundred cases of abuse against Afghan prisoners at some thirty U.S. firebases.

The CIA ran its own secret detention centers, which were off-limits even to the U.S. military. One was situated at the former Ariana Hotel in central Kabul, just a few minutes’ drive from the U.S. embassy. The Salt Pit was at an old brick factory just outside Kabul. Here, in November 2002, Afghan guards employed by the CIA stripped naked a young Afghan detainee and chained him to the concrete floor in the middle of winter. He died the next day, ending up as a “ghost detainee,” one of an unknown number of people who just disappeared from the face of the earth because nobody could ask the CIA any questions. By 2005, thirty-three military personnel were facing charges of prisoner abuse, but only one civilian, David Passaro, forty, a CIA contractor, faced such charges. He went on trial in August 2006 on assault charges in connection with the death of Abdul Wali, the prisoner who died in June 2003 at the U.S. firebase in Asadabad.
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Passaro’s trial in Raleigh, North Carolina, included testimony on how he repeatedly hit Wali, a twenty-eight-year-old farmer, who was chained to the floor of his cell and was in such pain he pleaded to be killed.
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In February 2007, Passaro received an eight-year sentence, becoming the first U.S. civilian to be convicted of abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the worst aspects of the military’s lack of preparedness for the war in Afghanistan was the extent to which it had to rely on private contractors for simple tasks. Contractors carried out interrogations, ran jails, provided bodyguards, carried out drug eradication, trained the police and army, and built wells and schoolhouses—all tasks that used to be carried out by the U.S. Army, the State Department, or USAID. The contractors’ role was even greater in Iraq. With the kind of button-down security in place in Afghanistan, these people were virtually unaccountable. Government auditors could not check on their work while they continued to be paid vast sums. The use of private contractors by the CIA expanded enormously after 2002 as more tasks needed to be done by the military and the Pentagon had to conserve its soldiers for the upcoming war in Iraq. Subsequently the extensive use of contractors became the norm. DynCorp had won a $52 million contract to protect President Karzai and other Afghan leaders in 2003. Contractors now carried out secret interrogations and guarded prisoners.

The possession of such extensive powers with little oversight was open to abuse, brutality, and scandal, as in the astonishing case of two self-described American contractors and a journalist who were caught running a private jail in Kabul. When he was caught, their leader, Jonathan Idema, claimed to be working for the CIA. At his Kabul home, three Afghans were found hanging from the ceiling and five others badly beaten. Idema was a bounty hunter, but he had easily posed as a U.S. intelligence officer. He and his accomplices were sentenced by an Afghan court to long periods in jail.
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Britain’s MI6 worked with more discretion than the CIA but was equally untutored in the ways of Afghanistan. A UK government report in 2005 said that British agents had conducted more than two thousand interviews of suspects in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and Iraq and that there were “fewer than 15 occasions when UK intelligence personnel” broke the law regarding interrogations. The report concluded that intelligence personnel “were not sufficiently well trained on the Geneva Conventions.”
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MI6 and CIA officers frequently conducted joint interrogations.

The most explosive policy adopted by the CIA was the process of rendition. Rendered prisoners were truly “ghost detainees,” with no rights, no prospect of a trial, and a future of permanent detention by unsavory regimes. CIA snatch teams could pick up prisoners anywhere in the world and transport them anywhere they liked. In spring 2002, the ICRC demanded that it be given access to prisoners under rendition. Instead, CIA lawyers further twisted legal boundaries by establishing a new category of prisoner: Persons Under Control, or PUC. Anyone held as PUC was automatically denied access to the ICRC, and even his existence was denied.
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The ICRC became extremely frustrated with U.S. obduracy. In January 2004, after meeting U.S. officials in Washington, ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger went public saying he was deeply concerned about “the fate of an unknown number of people captured as part of the so-called global war on terror and held in undisclosed locations.”
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By now the ICRC was maintaining its own files on some 100 rendered prisoners who had simply disappeared. U.S. human rights lawyer Scott Horton said up to 150 people had been rendered by the CIA between 2001 and 2005.
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